Self Esteem

Self Esteem is the project of Rebecca Lucy Taylor, raised in Rotherham, where her father worked as a health and safety advisor and amateur musician and her mother as a secretary. She attended Wales High School, crediting music teacher Antony Wright with teaching her to sing.

Before going solo, Taylor was one half of the Sheffield folk duo Slow Club with Charles Watson, formed in 2006. The band paused work in 2017 after a final tour that left her feeling unfulfilled, a period captured in the documentary Our Most Brilliant Friends.

She released her first Self Esteem single, 'Your Wife', in 2017, followed by the albums Compliments Please (2019), Prioritise Pleasure (2021) and A Complicated Woman (2025). She won the BBC Music Introducing Artist of the Year award in 2021 and was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2022 for Prioritise Pleasure.

Her songs are built around large, layered vocal arrangements and percussion-heavy production, with lyrics addressing womanhood, self-worth and the expectations placed on women. Live, she performs with a group of backing vocalists and tightly rehearsed, deliberately stylised choreography that keeps the material's blunt, conversational tone intact.

Taylor has also worked in theatre and television, appearing in I Hate Suzie and Smothered. From September 2023 to March 2024 she played Sally Bowles in the West End production of Cabaret, and is now performing in a West End revival of Teeth 'n' Smiles.